This remote mountain tomb between Thebes and Aswan is intriguing not just for its own decorations but also the stylized old graffiti from explorers and tomb raiders who descended on the Nile Valley following Napoleon’s Egypt campaign around 1800. As we can see, Charles Leonard Irby and James Mangles, the authors of “Travels in
It’s the Moorish details that make this theater particularly lovely. Built by Albert Kahn in 1911 and closed in 1975, it’s the only one of his theaters still standing and the only one left in Detroit’s old entertainment district around Monroe Street – but not for long. Current plans are to preserve just the
On a nice Sunday, you can run into all sorts of people wandering and biking around these abandoned sheds. And yet this former barracks complex in the East German countryside is in good shape, considering that the military moved out around the time the wall came down. The bright paint is impressive, as is
“The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather-beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins.”
It’s rare to find a time capsule that’s quite this preserved. An old mansion in Luxembourg has become a museum of family life in pre-WW II Europe. The shelves in the attic were littered with school books, journals, letters, funeral notices and bills. Notebooks from a girl named Louise showed her progress in calligraphy
Utterly isolated, apparently untouched for years – this place has the eerie kind of remoteness where every outside sound is startling and the thought of human habitation borders on the absurd. The prison is small and old, a mere aging stain in a perfect countryside, a decaying heap of bricks surrounded by forests and
Found inside a closet in an old psychiatric ward in Italy. Burnt, painted, scribbled on, these cards have turned into a very personal visual poem over time.
The recent demolition of the Fairmont Theater was sad news. Discovering the Fairmont was one of my favorite theater experiences ever. It had all the elements that make up a perfect ruin exploration: adventure, beauty and mystery. It was fun and scary, left a nice coating of moldy air like flocked wallpaper on the
This vacant spa in former East Germany is as ready as ever to serve astute philosophers. Lie back, close your eyes, and let the Unterwassermassage take you somewhere Beyond Good and Evil. Who knows what you’ll come up with next if you ever come up again?
Colorful wallpaper reigned inside the old Heiden Hotel in the Catskills, which unfortunately no longer stands. More images here.
An early morning scene in late spring, near a small harbor town in Alaska.
Found in the basement of an empty asylum building on the Mediterranean coast.
Someone took the warning “Do Not Remove From Hospital” on the patient files a bit too seriously when this place was shuttered. Of course it seems to be a rarity whenever the staff of a closing hospital actually disposes of medical records in a way that keeps them confidential. Usually the echo of
The German Catholic Orphanage in Buffalo, New York, was built in 1927 and served as a temporary home for thousands of kids over the decades. It’s still strikingly pretty, although its chapel (added in 1938) is quickly declining into a vandalized dump site. Its days are numbered anyway; construction and demolition are about to